After the Shelter Cluster: Coordinating a Nation-wide ...

NEPALAfter the Shelter Cluster: Coordinating a Nation-wide Housing Reconstruction Program

HUMANITARIAN RESPONSE CASE STUDY 29

CRS NEPAL | COORDINATING A NATION-WIDE HOUSING RECONSTRUCTION PROGRAM | CASE STUDY

What did CRS and Partners do?CRS led the third phase of the Housing Recovery and

Reconstruction Platform (HRRP), which was established in Nepal to continue the work previously coordinated by the Shelter Cluster following the 2015 earthquake. CRS took over as the lead agency of HRRP in March 2017. The platform provides coordination support services for the National Reconstruction Authority (NRA), Building and Grant Management and Local Infrastructure (GMALI), Central Level Programme Implementation Units (CLPIUs), other relevant government authorities, donors and Partner Organisations (POs).

The HRRP works at municipal, district, and national levels, providing support primarily to the 14 districts most affected by the earthquake, as well as roving support to the 18 moderately affected districts.

HRRP’s work mainly focus on:• Monitoring and documenting the housing

reconstruction process.

• Facilitating coordination and experience sharing to support improvements in coverage and quality of socio-technical assistance.

• Supporting collective planning and roll out of additional support for vulnerable households.

• Addressing gaps and duplications.

• Conducting advocacy, communications, and research.

Through these activities, HRRP is facilitating the POs, government, donors and other stakeholders to help affected families as they build more resilient homes and communities. At the same time, HRRP is institutionalizing recovery and capacity for housing reconstruction and the resilient development of Nepal. In the third phase of HRRP, CRS has successfully gained significant buy-in from partner agencies, and managed the initial establishment of long-term recovery structures for affected families through coordination and information management.

BackgroundOn Saturday, 25 April 2015, the magnitude 7.6 Gorkha

Earthquake killed 8,790, and injured 22,300 people. It is estimated that 8 million people (almost one third of the total population) were affected. When the biggest aftershock (M7.3) occurred on 12 May 2015, a further 218 people died, and more than 2,500 were injured. By 24 May 2016, the country had experienced more than 20,450 aftershocks, five of them exceeding M6.

Following the earthquake, all humanitarian clusters were activated and began coordinating partners in each sector. As the response moved into recovery, the Government of Nepal (GoN) developed its housing reconstruction programme, which it centered around two types of grants made available to affected families:

1. A housing reconstruction grant of up to USD $2,575 (NRs 300,000), paid in 3 tranches according to compliance with earthquake resilient techniques.

2. A housing retrofit grant of up to USD $858 (NRs 100,000), paid in 2 tranches.

3. An additional top up support of NRs 50,000 to build the traditional house to the affected families in 6 identified heritage settlement in the earthquake affected districts.

4. A top support of NRs 50,000 to the most vulnerable families.

The grants were not intended to cover the full cost of reconstruction or retrofit, but were intended to contribute towards the costs of earthquake resilient elements and to incentivize families to include these elements. By April 2019, the government had disbursed more than 1.6 billion USD through the grants to 755,868 families.

BANGLADESH

INDIA

PAKISTANNEPAL

CHINA

PROJECT DESCRIPTIONCountry: Nepal

Project location: 32 earthquake-affected districts of Nepal.

Disaster: Gorkha earthquake 25th April 2015 and major aftershock, 12th May 2015.

Project Duration: HRRP3; March 2017 to July 2019 (29 months)

Target Population: approximately 4,297,700 earthquake affected people across 32 districts.

Donor(s): DFID, CRS internal funds.

Partner(s): National Reconstruction Agency (Nepal), Government of Nepal, National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET), numerous agencies.

66,338 men and women received mason training.

CRS NEPAL | COORDINATING A NATION-WIDE HOUSING RECONSTRUCTION PROGRAM | CASE STUDY

Problem StatementHousing was by far the most affected sector following

the Gorkha Earthquake. The number of partners working on shelter support and housing recovery reflected this, with more than 100 organizations continuing to support housing recovery three years after the quake. As a result of the large number of organizations and the scale of the response, it was acknowledged early by the Shelter Cluster, donors, government, and I/NGOs that coordination support of some form would be required in the long term.

The GoN deployed more than 3,000 technical staff to carry out inspections associated with disbursement of the tranches, and to provide technical assistance to families. Recognizing that government engineers would be primarily occupied with inspections, the government requested I/NGOs to provide Socio-Technical Assistance (STA). Coverage STA provided by I/NGOs was not able to cover all the affected families, with much of the INGO and donor money concentrated in a few geographic areas. Some organizations also used their funds to provide the reconstruction grant directly, thereby limiting the extent of their STA work. However, the table below provides the overview on the socio-technical assistance reached to the affected families over the period of 4 years.

Socio-Technical AssistanceCoverage by Municipalities (5 or more TAs) 55 / 282

Coverage by municipal wards (5 or more TAs) 179 / 2,552

Housing partners currently active 23

Demonstration construction (houses) 1,839 Number of door-to-door visits (families) 158,059

Number of Community Reconstruction Committees formed or supported

2,425

Total number of masons trained (individuals) 66,338

Skills training 44,985

Vocational training 21,353

Support provided though help desk / resource centres / hotlines (families)

63,846

Community / family orientations (individuals) 265,008

Project ProcessThe Housing Reconstruction and Recovery Platform

(HRRP) was established to continue the coordination of housing recovery following the downscale of the Shelter Cluster back to its original form as standing cluster in Nepal. Its responsibilities included gathering data from all (I)NGO partners undertaking housing recovery across the 33 affected districts to ensure that the most severely affected were all being reached, and to collect details about what sort of housing recovery assistance was being delivered.

In phases 1 and 2 of HRRP, between December 2015 and February 2017, HRRP was led by IOM, with input in phase one from UN-Habitat, and in phase 2 from senior CRS staff. CRS began leading HRRP in phase three, starting in March 2017. Employing a hub and spoke structure, in which staff from active agencies were appointed as HRRP district coordinators, HRRP drew heavily on existing capacities of agency and govern-ment officers to ensure that significant involvement and cooperation took place with all entities including the GoN, development partners and affected communities.

As a leading agency of HRRP, CRS has been improvis-ing the program delivery and output through:

• Specialize human resources in operations, monitoring and evaluation and communications.

• Capacity building of staff both within HRRP and its partner agencies and government offices.

• Intensifying the coordination- collaboration support in the affected districts in the post-earthquake reconstruction through the deployment of technical as well as general coordinators.

• Identifying the major strength of the coordination as proper information management and enhancing the Information Management Unit of HRRP with dedicated human resources with vast technical and coordination expertise.

• Understanding the limitation due to the translation services which has led to the exclusion of local actors in the previous phases of HRRP, CRS has appointed specialize human resources in translation.

HRRP phase 3, under the leadership of CRS has been able to:

• Provide coordination services across 32 districts for a total of 203 partners (45 active as of Feb 2019).

• Monitor the housing reconstruction. Support the Government of Nepal with technical support for families and the field engineers.

• Interact with families and host community members about reconstruction activities, and address priority issues they, and the implementing partner, face for ensuring smooth reconstruction.

• Provide guidance and develop reports including: joint advocacy reports, information bulletins and Socio-Technical Assistance packages agreed upon with NRA and partners.

• Advocate with government partners on behalf of families and agencies to implement an alternative grant specifically for retrofitting existing new or damaged buildings, allowing them to meet the building code requirements.

• Predict the gaps in coverage of assistance arising from agencies withdrawing from their programs.

Coordination Accomplishements

Credit: HRRP

• Collaborate with government agencies and partners to plan for specialized housing reconstruction and recovery support for vulnerable communities, define what actions will be taken and who will be responsible for them.

• High involvement of national organization, and buy-in with GoN and HRRP district Unit located within the district government offices in HRRP3.

• Focus agency responses on the question of appropriateness.

Wider Impacts of HRRP• Provided technical input for the development of

reconstruction guidelines and policies along with documentation of various issues at district and municipality levels, allowing the government to prepare and revise guidelines and policies.

• Conducting advocacy on Socio-technical Assistance and overcoming barriers to reconstruction led some agencies to change their programs to include more effective STA.

• Promoted advocacy initiatives that resulted in the government engaging more in co-funding activities, and considering provision of direct STA. One huge achievement is the recruitment process for 210 senior engineers, 250 social mobilizers and 908 mobile masons by the GoN.

• Support for district orientations and trainings through the timely transfer of information from the national level to district and municipal levels through events with government and partner staff. District level collaboration and coordination was enhanced by the integrated work of the district teams. Large and small meetings, joint monitoring visits, trainings, IM support to government offices, planning exercises, and reporting to the national level are some of the activities that contributed to this.

• Information management provided access to dynamic data and analysis, which was used by government and partners to reduce gaps, avoid duplications and target appropriate responses, based on better defined needs. This resulted in families having better access to more appropriate support.

• Facilitation supported the Partner Organizations and GoN to come together for discussions on concerns related to housing construction, and the sharing of best practices/approaches in housing reconstruction.

• Documentation of the reconstruction process through district reports, HRRP bulletins, coordination meeting minutes, research on various topics.

• Advocacy within the shelter sector for an approach that focused on shelter as a process not a product, and move away from input and output-based measurements of success (materials supplied and units built) and towards outcomes and impacts-focused assessment.

• Support for the GoN’s field monitoring through Joint Monitoring Visits along with Implementing partners.

Where can I find out more? Shelter Projects case study

HRRP website

Nepal Earthquake 2015: House Reconstruction Timeline

Ward No. 5, Temal Rural Municipality, Kavrepalanchok: Demo retrofit house carried out as part of the DFID funded retrofit project implemented by a con-sortium of UNOPS, Build Change, and BBC Media Action. Two male and three

female masons are being trained under two head masons and an engineer.

Photo credit: HRRP

Acknowledgements

Siobhan Kennedy, HRRP / CRSLoren Lockwood, HRRP / CRSSeki Hirano, CRSAnu Prasai Lama, HRRP/CRSCover photo: Jen Hardy/CRS

Edited by: Laura Howlett. Graphic design: Livia Mikulec. Published: 2019228 W. Lexington Street, Baltimore, MD 21201. For more information, contact [email protected]© 2019 Catholic Relief Services. All Rights Reserved. crs.org

“ I have been working with the Shelter Cluster and HRRP since 2015 right after the earthquake.

Our team has implemented the Community Mobilization Program in our target area of Gorkha

and Sindhupalchok and achieved good housing reconstruction progress. HRRP as a platform has given us an opportunity to share our experience

and we hope that these good practices could be helpful to other earthquake affected area.

We are looking forward to completing housing reconstruction together with HRRP.”

– Tomoki MIYANO, Team Leader, TPIS-ERP (JICA Grant Aid Project)/EHRP (JICA Loan Project)